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Jennifer Lynch

Jennifer Lynch

Jennifer Lynch is a Senior Staff Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and works on privacy and civil liberties issues in new technologies as part of EFF’s Street Level Surveillance and Transparency Projects. Jennifer is a frequent speaker and lecturer at law schools and legal conferences on law enforcement surveillance programs, government transparency, domestic drones, location data, and biometrics. She has written an influential white paper on biometric data collection in immigrant communities and has testified about facial recognition and its Fourth Amendment implications before the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. In Jennifer's transparency work, she successfully sued the Federal Aviation Administration and Customs and Border Protection to obtain thousands of pages of previously unpublished drone records and the FBI to obtain new and revealing information about its Next Generation Identification face recognition program. She has also written numerous amicus briefs in federal and state courts on cell site location information and DNA.

Prior to joining EFF, Jennifer was the Clinical Teaching Fellow with the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, where she specialized in privacy and intellectual property issues. Before the Clinic, Jennifer practiced civil litigation with Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco and clerked for Judge A. Howard Matz (now retired) in the Central District of California. She earned both her undergraduate and law degrees from UC Berkeley. She has published academically on identity theft and phishing attacks (20 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 259) and sovereign immunity in civil rights cases (62 Fla. L. Rev. 203) and has been interviewed by major and technical news media, including NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes, NPR, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, CNet, Nova, Popular Science, Scientific American, and Ars Technica.

Once again, a federal court will decide whether police can track your movements over an extended period of time without a search warrant. Federal and state courts have divided over whether the Fourth Amendment requires police seek a search warrant to obtain historical cell site location information (CSLI)—the records of...

The FBI plans to roll out the face recognition component of its massive Next Generation Identification (NGI) biometrics database this summer—but the Bureau has six years of catching up to do in explaining to Americans exactly how it plans to collect, use and protect this data. Today we ...

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has put police on notice: an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) alert, without human verification, is not enough to pull someone over. Last week, the appellate court issued an important opinion in Green v. City & County of San Francisco, a civil rights...

New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer. EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the...

Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation. The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of...

Sunshine Week is often a time for transparency advocates to collectively lament about government secrecy and institutional resistance to accountability. But the week of advocacy is also an opportunity to highlight how, through patience and a lot of court motions, organizations such as EFF can pry important documents from agencies...

Last week, the federal government finally dismissed 11 controversial counts from its overzealous prosecution of journalist Barrett Brown. These counts charged Brown with identity theft for sharing a link to records documenting improper and potentially illegal activities by the U.S. intelligence contractor, Stratfor Global Intelligence. The fact that Brown has...

The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas today filed a motion to dismiss 11 charges against Barrett Brown in a criminal prosecution that would have had massive implications for journalism and the right of ordinary people to share links. EFF has written extensively about the case...